From the "Fuck That Guy" Department

"A regionalist is one who picked out a region (such as the abdomen fundament or elbow [)] and has a pain [in] it."
— Robert Frost, from The Notebooks of Robert Frost (quoted here)

Reading Reading Comics

My first post-/non-generals book is Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics, which Emily bought a while ago and I've been saving for a treat. It's a really great overview of the past quarter century or so of comics/graphic novels/"sequential pictorial narrative art"/what-have-you, written by one of the best contemporary critics of same. I care only a little about comics, but I love Wolk: he has the wonderful, and rare, critical ability to make me feel excited even about work that I already know I don't really respond to (Grant Morrison, for instance) just because his own response is so energetic and intelligent. This puts him in a class with people like Pauline Kael, Robert Christgau, Stanley Cavell, etc. Anyway, highly recommended. (Yes, I realize it's a little funny that I'm "relaxing" with a book of criticism — but I suppose, if I'm honest with myself, I love really good criticism almost more than anything else.)

And it reminds me of something you might want to look at, Greg, for your local Modernism project: Alan Moore's only prose novel, Voice of the Fire, which sounds like it's squarely in the tradition of Paterson and Briggflats. Amazon says: "In a story full of lust, madness, and ecstasy, we meet twelve distinctive characters that lived in the same region of central England over a span of six thousand years. Each interconnected tale traces a path in a journey of discovery of the secrets of the land. In the tradition of Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, Schwob's Imaginary Lives and Borges' A Universal History of Infamy, Moore travels through history blending truth and conjecture, in a novel that is dazzling, moving, sometimes tragic, but always mesmerizing." It's also, according to Wolk at least, bordering on unreadable. But don't you kind of want to find out for yourself?

"Dare not decline" - costs of going local

"Poet appointed dare not decline
to walk among the bogus"

So begins the second section of Basil Bunting's Briggflatts, and it sets an injunction the poet cannot keep precisely because "who appointed him?" is the next question. "Decline" - which by the poem's 1966 publication is a deeply troubled term for national devolution in post-War, post-imperial English national topology - can mean two things here: "don't refuse to walk among the bogus" or "don't descend down among the bogus". Either a self-harming injunction to wallow or a self-deceiving presumption of authenticity in a world dirtily without.

This strikes me as paradigmatic of the poet's choices who would attempt epic, even the modernist/Poundian "poem including history", when he (or she) is confronted with a national history that has both shrunk to rocky Saxon particularity and exploded to a global dialogue of plural histories. The rich and gorgeous language of the first section of Briggflatts uncovers a deep and local continuity that could be the epic poet's material (and has Pound's version of and use in the Cantos of "The Seafarer" as a predecessor): "By such rocks/ men killed Bloodaxe." It can be carved in stone and, as in section V's echo of Four Quartets, "Then is diffused in Now" (echo of the Quartets, but diminished -- not about presence and chronological fusion so much as "diffusion", dispersal, weakening).


The poem, called an "autobiography," includes in the second section a reference to Bunting's time as a spy for the British, who "decodes/ thunder, scans/ porridge bubbling, pipes clanking". Eliot, secretive but no spy, could once simply hear what the thunder said. Left the porridge alone. Bunting, in this role among the bogus, must detail the impoverished surround, laying "sick, self-maimed, self-hating,/ obstinate, mating/ beauty with squalor to beget lines still-born." The local, which is the ground of the poem and its primary linguistic audience, forms a substrate of filth rather than a solid ground in which to grow a regional epic. The poem begins to clog with fecal matter, which composts any number of rotting decapitated heads (as the poem's opening describes, "Decay thrusts the blade,/ wheat stands in excrement/ trembling"). As Bunting writes in section IV, "Today's posts are piles to drive into the quaggy past/ on which impermanent palaces balance."

The figure of the still-born, or as another possibility of this "mating", the monstrous is the abiding concern of the poem, itself then a half-product of a region (with the potential for epic) and of the deaths that register that region's deep history (with their potential for elegy). The tomb carved in section one is for the deceased child of the young couple who ride with the mason across Rawthey, and the poem gives gory details about the bestiality that brought us the Minotaur.

I'd like to explore the poem's conjoined topoi of monstrosity and hybridity in the formation of subjective declension. But I'll leave that for now and make a note about the "still-born" as a description of both poem and nation. Though the "sun rises on an acknowledged land" the poem ends with a coda that brings this diurnal recognition into the symbolic sweep of a completed elegiac movement, initiated in such an extended fashion as to make it hard to perceive until *blammo* he's playing off the end of "Lycidas". In the Coda,

A strong song tows
us, long earsick.
Blind, we follow
rain slant, spray flick
to fields we do not know.

Lycidas has its own coda -- its last eight lines zoom out to the third person to describe how "thus sang the uncouth swain" all that had come before. The gesture toward "fresh woods, and pastures new" complete the consolatory purpose of the elegy and declare closed the literary apprenticeship of the lyric speaker, who thereby promises and indeed begins to perform the consummation of his voice in writing the great work (the last 8 lines = one ottava rima stanza of italian epic). In Bunting, the coda works in the opposite direction, marshalling community in blind servile following of the song, and ends with a reworking of the "pastures new" from promise to disillusionment:

Where we are who knows
of kings who sup
while day fails? Who,
swinging his axe
to fell kings, guesses
where we go?

It's Lycidas rewritten with a proleptic view of the heads that would roll in the coming years, both the need for protestant revolution and an acknowledgment of its costs (esp. in post-industrial -- notice how these poems of local epic or thwarted epic have so much interest in work, in craft).

Oh, i'm getting tired of writing this. Something something. The political economy of the commonweal (see the etymology of "bogus" in the OED, as it emerges as a major point of reactionary possibility in English late-mod. epics in this period (see also Hill's Mercian Hymns, lots of Hughes's poems I think) and as a grounding moment in the portraits of community and region that are all over the place in America at this point (Paterson, Howl, Brooks's sketches of Bronzeville, Hughes's "Portrait of a Dream Deferred").

Sorry to cop out but I got other work to do. May come back and edit this eventually. Could continue in the comments, since i'm sure i haven't made myself very clear.

Howl, New Jersey, Holla

Have either of you looked at a little book called The Poem that Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later? Silly title, I know, but it's actually pretty useful. The collection is edited by Jason Shinder, Ginsberg's personal assistant from the late 70s on, and his introduction is kind of embarrassingly idolatrous and not very well-written. But the volume does bring together a number of interesting reactions to "Howl" (by, among others, Amiri Baraka, Marjorie Perloff (who argues that Ginsberg is a direct inheritor of Modernism [OK, fine, whatever] and that "Howl" is really about WWII [more interesting]), Billy Collins (!), John Cage, and Rick Moody) as well as including a facsimile of the original mimeographed edition, which "costed [sic] $10.00 typed by poet Robert Creely [sic] dittoed by Martha Rexroth transported by me to the hands of Robert Lavigne [sic] in exchange for several drawings," according to Ginsberg's inscription. (Doesn't $10 seem like kind of a lot of money for 1956? Seems like one could do a Lawrence Rainey-esque analysis of the economics of this first presentation.)

A couple of remarks about the poem itself: has anyone written on the possible influence of W.H. Auden on Ginsberg? Auden is mentioned in Shinder's preface as one of Ginsberg's "'enemies'," but also an "eternal presence": I don't know much about their personal relationship. But on this reading I notice quite a few touches which seem Audenesque; for one, the unexpected dropping and adding of definite articles (examples include "the drear light of Zoo" and "the last fantastic book thrown out of the tenement window"). This is something Auden does a lot, and I think the effect in his poems is usually to either particularize or universalize the rhetorical situation of any given poem: kind of a Zoom-In/Zoom-Out effect. In "Howl," Ginsberg utilizes this to keep the reader involved on a macrosociological level ("this is an important poem: it's about a generation, it's about a nation, it's about history") and on a more micro-, affective/emotional level ("this is about the author, his friends, his mother, or me"). It's a technique Whitman uses too, of course, but Ginsberg's interest in including shabby, sordid or ironic details which temporarily undercut the grandeur of the macro-phrases (e.g. "in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets"; compare "Spain 1937") is closer to (early) Auden, I think.

Second idea: Ginsberg's insistent return to New Jersey place names ("Paterson," "Newark," "the filthy Passaic," etc.), among, admittedly, a lot of other place names, has to be understood, in its historical context, as a very complicated rhetorical move. Because New Jersey was not just where Ginsberg was from, and thus a signifier of the "real" or the "autobiographical," but also, by the mid-1950s, a landscape that was newly literary, thanks to the ecstatic critical reception of William Carlos Williams' still-in-progress Paterson. As Perloff points out her chapter on him in The Poetics of Indeterminacy, the publication of Paterson had finally secured a major reputation for Williams, long considered a marginal figure of the Modernist movement. Thus Paterson, which ten years earlier would have been fairly meaningless as a literary signifier, now evokes a whole complex of ideas about Modernism and American poetry that Ginsberg slyly insists upon. (And WCW also wrote the introduction to Howl's first commercial edition, as Adrienne pointed out months ago.)

Anyway, it's interesting to think of the symbolic capital that New Jersey acquires in this period, as the breeding ground of the only ideologically correct,* homegrown version of High Modernism (Williams') as well as the most incendiary updating/challenging of the academic version of Modernism: significantly a humble state, in proximity to a great metropolis but not containing it, a place synonymous with the simple, homely and plain, which also just happens to be the site of some of the worst industrial exploitation and ecological spoilage in the entire country. This is quite a different pole to orient us than London or New York, and the attitude of its writers to it is also significantly different: sure, it's a waste land, they tell us, but it's our waste land, and we like it that way. And this in turn might have something to do with the remarks by Leslie Fiedler that Adrienne just posted, about the American mediation (some would say adulteration) of Modernism through regionalism. But I'm getting hungry, so I'd better stop here and drag myself through some Brooklyn streets to go looking for a sandwich fix.

* If you ignore the Communism.

In literary love

Below is the basic argument of Leslie Fiedler's essay War, Exile, and the Death of Honor from his book Wating For the End: A portrait of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Its Writers". I want his brain.



"It is tempting to think of the practice of our writers of the Twenties as representing a decisive disavowal of the temptations of avant-gardism, and, in a sense, this is true; but it is not true enough. Hemingway and Gertrude Stein may have become at last, symbolically as well as personally, enemies; yet the example of her war on syntax and coherence made him to the end a more insidious subverter of common speech than the readers of Life magazine could ever permit themselves to recognize even if they were capable of doing so. And however stubbornly Faulkner insisted on reinventing stream-of-consciousness in his own home-made terms, the experiments of Joyce surely inspired the effort. The ostensible rejection and the abiding nostalgia, the pride and shame of the generation of the Twenties in its encounter with Europe, is, in fact, the reaction of the tourist, the provincial tourist. It matters little whether the writers played abroad for a long time like Fitzgerald, or retreated immediately to their home towns like Faulkner, or kept seeking on foreign continents images of Montana and Upper Michigan like Hemingway--the writers who came of age in WWI remained what they were to begin with: country boys perpetually astonished at meeting the Big City and the Great World, provincials forever surprised to discover themselves in London or Paris or Antibes, and afterward dazzled to remember that they had ever been in such improbable places."

Fiedler than goes on to recount the long tradition of American writers abroad (From Franklin to Irving, Hawthorne and Melville to Baldwin and Burroughs) "It is, indeed, astonishing how many especially American fictions were conceived or actually executed abroad from Rip Van Winkle through the Leather Stocking Tales, the Marble Faun of Hawthorne, Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson to Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and The Sun Also Rises of Hemingway.

"Such novels of exile and return reflect the deepest truth, the mythical truth of the experience of Americans abroad, a truth of art which life does not always succeed in imitating, though it is one to which it aspires. TS Eliot may never go back to St. Louis to live out his declining years, while Pound, released from captivity in the States, seems set on dying in Rapallo. And if Rapallo looks, as Karl Shapiro has somewhere observed, just like Santa Barbara, California, that is just one of those irrelevant jokes which history plays on us all"

He goes on to flush out this theme of exile and return. "Even Eliot, Anglo-Catholic and Royalist, returns home in his imagination, making a pilgrimage in the Four Quartets not only to New England, but even, less forseeably, to Huck Finn's Mississippi, beside which he was born."

"In Paris, obviously different from the dream of Paris, the American discovers he can bear Kansas City, which he began knowing was different from all dreams of it; and this is worth his fare plus whatever heartache he pays as surtax."

"And though there is a sense in which the anti-war novel is merely a late sub-variety of the international theme (and another in which it is a sub-genre of the class-struggle book), we are compelled how to recognize it as the greatest and most characteristic literary invention of the Twenties."

"But pacifism, too, was a fiction of WWII, which saw thousands of young men, who earlier had risen in schools and colleges to swear that they would never bear arms, march off to battle--as often as not with copies of anti-warbooks in their packs. Those books were real enough, like the passion that prompted them, and the zeal with which they were read; only the promises were illusory."

"We inhabit for the first time a world in which men begin wars knowing that their avowed ends will not be accomplished, a world in which it is more and more difficult to believe that the conflicts we cannot avert are in any sense justified. And in such a world, the draft dodger, the malingerer, the goldbrick, the crap-out, all who make what Hemingway was the first to call 'a separate peace,' all who somehow survive the bombardment of shells and cant, become a new kind of anti-heroic hero. And it is precisely such sad sacks, such refugees from honor and glory, who returned to American to beget or become the generation of the Thirties."

Anyone reading this?

Like cyberpunk was supposed to save literature, Robert Penn Warren was supposed to be the 20th century Melville according to mid-century American critics. Womp Womp. Anyway, I checked this out from the library, haven't had time to really look at it, but wondering if anyone else was planning on it/had heard of it

From wikipedia:

The Agrarians evolved from a philosophical discussion group known as the "Fugitives" or "Fugitive Poets", whose studies of poetic modernism and of H. L. Mencken's stinging critique of Southern culture led them to confront the effect of modernity on Southern culture and tradition. The informal leader of the Fugitives and the Agrarians was John Crowe Ransom, though he formally repudiated agrarianism in a 1945 essay. The most eloquent exponent of the Agrarian philosophy eventually proved to be Ransom's student and Donald Davidson's friend, Richard M. Weaver. Rather surprisingly, Weaver taught at a Northern institution, the University of Chicago.

The Agrarians were opposed to unbridled modernism and industrialism and bemoaned the loss of traditional Southern culture. Their manifesto was an attack on modern industrial America and posited an alternate direction based on a return to traditional American values, especially what later was called republicanism.

Seward Collins, editor of The American Review, which published some essays by Agrarians in 1933, praised Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler for thwarting a communist revolution in Germany. Allen Tate published a critique of fascism in the 1936 The New Republic, to distance himself (and the other Agrarians) from Collins.

Robert Penn Warren eventually emerged as the most accomplished of the Agrarians, not only as a major American poet but also as a novelist, especially for his 1946 All the King's Men. Warren's later political and social views, in particular his espousing of a liberal political philosophy and his support for racial integration, set him apart from the conservatism of the Agrarians.

I'll Take My Stand was originally criticized as a reactionary and romanticized defense of the Old South, and viewed as little more than useless nostalgia. In recent years, scholars such as Carlson, Scotchie, Genovese and others have taken a second look at this book in light of the problems of modern industrial society and its effect on the human condition and the environment.

Move over Greenwich Village

Bet you thought a city like New York, or possibly Chicago was the hub of Modernism in America. Well, WRONG. Apparently, Provincetown, Mass. is where it's at.

Let's start with the obvious. Eugene O'Neill had his big summer theater there and made his name and those of his plays famous. The Provincetown Players were the leaders in experimental theater in the early/mid 20th century. Tennessee Williams also debuted several of his plays with this company.

Moving on. In 1925, Eugene O'Neill rented his house to Edmund Wilson, who came to Provincetown to seduce Edna St. Vincent Millay. When that didn't work out, Wilson had giant alcoholic bashes with E.E. Cummings and John Dos Passos. The house collapsed in 1931 (the ghost of too much partying shook it down)

Kerouac wrote sections of On The Road in Provincetown (not a big deal, right? He wrote that everywhere, but still)

And then, in 1935, Hans Hoffman opened his summer school of art there, which brought in the likes of Rothko and Pollock and Motherwell and Robert DeNiro's Dad. The first American exhibit of Abstract Expressionism was in Provincetown in 1949

AND Bette Davis made her stage debute in Provincetown.

Mailer lives there now, as does Grace Paley